The world wide web is often regarded as the ‘world’s Wild West’ – a digital free-for-all, uninhibited by law, order and, frequently, human decency.

But there are regulations governing our behaviour online and – knowingly or not – most of us simply can’t help but conform to them.

For instance, Poe’s Law – proposed by Nathan Poe in 2005 – states: ‘Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.’

There is also Danth’s Law – named after a user of the RPG.net forums called Danth in 2005 – that decrees: ‘If you have to insist you’ve won an internet argument, you’ve probably lost badly.’

And there is Pommer’s Law, which was formulated by Rob Pommer in 2007. It states: ‘A person’s mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.’

The undisputed king of the internet aphorism is Mike Godwin, a US lawyer and author. Godwin’s Law, which was coined back in 1990, has almost become the first commandment of the internet: ‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.’ In other words, if any debate goes on for more than a few comments, someone will draw a spurious – and in Godwin’s view, highly offensive – parallel to Nazism.

The law’s success is seen by the fact it is now used offline as much as on. You’ll find no shortage of flippant comments that you can apply the law to – from those who call feminists ‘feminazis’ to the council apparatchik referred to as a ‘jumped-up little Hitler’.

Godwin told Metro: ‘In the 1980s, I’d been reading a bunch of literature about the Holocaust, notably Primo Levi’s books, and it seemed to me that glib comparisons to Nazis, Hitler or the Holocaust had the effect of trivialising what was a singular historical event.

‘So it seemed wrong for people on the then nascent but quickly growing internet to use Hitler and Nazis as their go-to comparisons. I set out to try to figure out a clever, self-replicating way to make people more self-conscious about it.

‘And it occurred to me that people hate being told that they’re predictable, or mechanical, or lack freedom of choice – so I framed Godwin’s Law as a kind of mock law of physics.

‘I hoped people might begin to see how they had slipped unreflectively into rhetorical excess – and would be embarrassed about having done so.’

Sometimes you can spot two laws for the price of one. Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the New Statesman, is the creator of Lewis’s Law, the 2012 dictum that ‘the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism’.

But search for the original tweet in which Lewis codified her regulation and you’ll observe a message that takes issue with her position – and almost looks as if it is written to prove Godwin’s point. ‘Trite tripe’, responded @DopeyJim. ‘Do comments on any article about Nazism justify Nazism?’

Lewis coined her adage because it seemed ‘every time I read a piece about feminism, in the comments underneath, there would be someone calling the author hysterical or a bitch’.

She tweeted her theory to technology journalist Alice Marwick – who wrote about it in Wired magazine.

Lewis posted the article on her Tumblr page and it was reblogged more than 3,000 times.

The law then received its own Wikipedia entry and has been applied to articles on everything from gay rights to anti-racism campaigns.

Lewis said: ‘I think the internet is a fascinating opportunity for anyone interested in human behaviour, because you can see people acting in such huge crowds, and so quickly. It really gives the lie to the idea that we’re all special snowflakes.

‘If you ever make a joke about a TV programme on Twitter, it’s a sobering experience to do a search and see just how many people made the same joke as you. I think that’s why there are so many internet laws – because we can see patterns of behaviour so transparently online, and want to make sense of them.’

Lewis is a one-adage wonder: ‘I tried coming up with another law, but it was rubbish and I don’t remember it. Difficult second law syndrome.’

Godwin has tried to add another maxim but ‘quite often I find that someone has thought of it before me’.

There are other lacklustre laws showing how tricky it is to come up with one that strikes a chord.

DeMyer’s Second Law – named after Ken DeMyer, who has four in total – doesn’t quite reach Godwin levels of acuity: ‘Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.’

Cohen’s Law, defined by Brian Cohen in 2007, is unlikely to gain much traction: ‘Whoever resorts to the argument that “whoever resorts to the argument that… …has automatically lost the debate” has automatically lost the debate.’

And then there is Smallman’s Law: ‘The more internet laws that are created, the more likely they are to be meaningless stabs at immortality.’